“Someplace shadier. And softer.” He drew her off the ground and they brushed off dust and pebbles and bits of this and that. Taking her by the hand, he led them back to the shore path and inland a bit, to a shady, grassy area dotted with wildflowers. There they lay beneath an oak tree and kissed. They kissed with eyes open and eyes closed. Kissed around words and through laughter and within silence. Then all at once they stopped kissing, both going limp as if the enormity of their combined feeling fell out of the sky and smashed them flat into the earth. Kennet’s head dropped onto Astrid’s breastbone, feeling the fist of her pounding heart. She had an arm thrown across her face, breathing hard.

Ten years, Kennet thought. We’ve been reaching and running toward each other. Non-stop. And now we’re here. Finally.

Good lord, I’m so tired…

“Oh my God,” Astrid said faintly. “I didn’t think it would ever…”

“I know.”

She laughed. “I’m exhausted.”

“I know.” He pressed into the beat of her heart, his one elbow still rocking her head, the other tight at her waist.

“Nyck.”

“I know. I know…”

He was enormously, embarrassingly sleepy. Her fingers running through his hair weren’t helping.

“Feels so good,” he said.

“Cafune.”

“Hm?”

“Cafune. Portuguese for… Well, it has no translation. It just means to do this.” Her fingers ran furrows along his scalp.

“Like this?” He caressed her arms.

“No. Cafune is fingers in your hair, nothing else. English doesn’t have a word like it.”

“We need one,” Kennet said.

“I love untranslatable words. Like pålägg. English doesn’t have one word meaning ‘anything you can put into a sandwich.’”

“Yes it does. ‘Sandwich-stuff.’”

“That’s two words.”

“I hyphenated them.”

“Clever boy.”

“Tell me another.”

“Korova. It’s Russian. It’s a buddy you bring along on a prison break so you can eat him.”

He lifted his head off her heart and stared. “I’m not sure if I’m horrified there’s a word for that, or if I’m horrified you know what it is.”

“I don’t even remember where I learned it.”

He put his head back down again. “More cafune, please.”

“More of it or more words like it?”

“Both.”

In between kissing, they thought up words in all their languages that didn’t translate to one word in English. Like lagom, which was Swedish for not too much, not too little, but just right.

“Your tongue when we kiss is lagom,” Astrid murmured beneath his mouth.

Or resfeber—what the Swedes called the anxious and anticipatory race of the traveler’s heart before a journey began.

“Like the resfeber when your train pulled in,” Kennet said. “And I wasn’t even the traveler.”